


start by pulling him from the fire and hoping he forgets the smell

by cyanica



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Blood, Body Horror, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Dark Anakin Skywalker, Depression, Force Ghost Anakin Skywalker, Gen, Gore, Hallucinations, Horror, Human Disaster Anakin Skywalker, Hurt No Comfort, Hurt Obi-Wan Kenobi, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Nightmares, Obi-Wan Kenobi Needs a Hug, Post-Order 66 (Star Wars), Post-Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, Survivor Guilt, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-11
Updated: 2020-07-11
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:07:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25203676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyanica/pseuds/cyanica
Summary: The universe had condemned them strangers, and then brothers, and then they fell, bound together by their own fault lines and inability to unlove – to let go, no matter how ruined and broken they tore themselves apart in the process.Or there’s a ghost in Obi-Wan’s hut tonight and he asks the question: “when is a monster not a monster?” Obi-Wan contemplates that the only time he had told Anakin Skywalker he loved him was when he hadn’t anymore.
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker | Darth Vader
Comments: 3
Kudos: 35





	start by pulling him from the fire and hoping he forgets the smell

**Author's Note:**

> because i am not ready for the obi-wan series. this shit, like obi-wan’s ptsd and visions/memories of anakin is what i wanna see, even if that’s probably too dark for disney. 
> 
> this fic takes a lot of inspiration from the poem ‘start here’ by caitlin siehl, which istg just fits obi-wan and anakin’s relationships post-mustafar,, like,, so well as if it was made for them. some lines are taken directly from the poem, because it’s actually my favorite thing in the world atm, so all credit goes to caitlin siehl. 
> 
> again, title is from ‘start here’ - caitlin siehl.

Somewhere above Tatooine’s binary skies of twin suns existing underneath the horizon line, the stars fell out of orbit and broke free from their aligned constellations, breaking apart at the seams into stardust.

Because –

Because they could, and that was enough for Obi-Wan not to question it – enough for him not to question anything anymore. He no longer questioned why sleep had become this alien, otherworldly sensation that eluded him in the way his sanity had, or why the nightmares became so frequent he could no longer distinguish what was reality and what was fantasy, or what his screaming subconscious ached to tell him – if anything at all – when it wasn’t condemning him to relive the volcanic ash burning within his eyes and suffocating acidic sulfur taste in his mouth until he vomited.

But with eulogic finality, the constellated stars burned like embers of flame cascading down upon the unforgiving desert, because it had finally happened. 

Obi-Wan had lost his mind. 

Or he had died.

Or both.

He catalysed that the pulsing, agonizing headache ripping his brain into ribbons for the last few days had finally done it’s job that Obi-Wan himself had been to cowardice to do, and it killed him – granted him peace in the form of his old, broken body lying amongst the ruined sandstone, with bile foaming from his mouth and metallic crimson dripping from his nose. 

Or if not for the migraine that amplified a cascade of blaster bolts through his head, it was the unrelenting inability to intake oxygen. His pounding heart hammered inside his chest as if breaking apart his rib cage from the inside out, and now his lungs had burned away into smithereens until he was left choking, asphyxiating on the ashen volcanic sands where his body lay.

But he was not dead, not yet. 

His dizzying, swirling vision collided into fragments like a kaleidoscope in a much too real, too damning way. He tried to count the calloused fingers on his scarred hand, or clench his fists so tightly within his palm that the nails embedded into his flesh drew pouring, copper blood onto the floor, because he needed to remind himself he was alive, by breaking himself apart.

The _thing_ – an abomination, a mirror image of a man he’d known from what could have been a lifetime ago – stood in the desert air of Obi-Wan’s shackled prison disguised as a sanctuary like a man condemned to be hung in the gallows that Obi-Wan had built.

His flesh had erupted into fiery burns and charred chucks of mattered muscle, hair, and organ until intangible, unseen embers ate away – _engulfed_ – his once whole body only to reveal blackened bones that split and fractured in the heat like glass against molten magma, shattering to smithereens amongst the ruins of the universe.

Eroded, necrotic tissue that wept pungent iron blood and pale-yellow pus morphed into twisted, inhuman metal that contorted around his body in agonizing, haphazardous shapes like a sickening torture device that sunk into his flesh until it _became_ him. Thousands of thick needles covered the expanse of his decaying, burned-away, rotting undead corpse and sunk into the flesh to electrify every exposed nerve ending, every pain receptors, every instance of human life and infected the once-living creature into something juxtaposingly mechanical. 

But it was the _smell_ that had Obi-Wan gagging on Mustafar’s sulfur ash and vomiting up molten acid that burned through his throat, his mouth, his lips like a waterfall of lava had erupted from within.

It was this rotting, decaying putrid essence of necrotic, burning skin and hair and blood and organ that smothering the ablazed desert air as if he had never walked away from the fire. It seared through his eyeballs until they wept, and forced his choking, retching throat to asphyxiate on the pure smell of rancid, blistering flesh, gasping for tainted, rotten air on his knees that had collided to the ground in the way the stars, the universe, had.

The being glowed an almighty, blinding blue that felt wrong in a way everything else had – in a way that nothing else truly did. 

There was an azure touch on his shoulder; a blazing cerulean graze down his arm; a cyan that erupted into his mouth with the familiarity of something gone and dead and burning and _brother_. He could feel an intoxicating burst of deadened lost light dripping from the inside of his bones with every touch through the Force, as if this being was made of it.

The magma had rotted him through, infecting his soul like the darkness was a disease, a curse that could be administered by the cares of fleshless metal fingers, the whisper of bloodied, blackened skin on his lips.

“When is a monster not a monster?” The ghost moved his mouth, but the voice didn’t match as if its vocal cords had been either shredded apart into bloodied fragments by the screams that Obi-Wan heard within his dreams, or that they had been burned from the inside out from the embers that had sparked within his lungs, and caught fire to the blood in the same way a tiny flame catches to gasoline.

An inhuman, deranged voice spoke in its wake. A loud, mechanical voice erupted from its mouth, past its blackened, blistering lips where the flesh frayed at the seams, and sent the sands into whirlwinds outside. 

_Leave me alone,_ Obi-Wan wants to say, but the words die like they never existed. Obi-Wan thinks he had sung the child asleep on the journey across the stars of this unforgiving wasteland of a desert – meaningless, poetic lullabies in a foreign tongue –, but that had been weeks ago. He wasn’t sure if he could say anything at all anymore.

“When is a monster not a monster, Master?” The ghost of Anakin Skywalker asked again, and consumed the room like a sandstorm stealing the serenity of the desert. 

But revoltingly, _insanely_ – Obi-Wan couldn’t look away, couldn’t expel his lost, dead, fallen apprentice away as insignificantly as a bad memory. In the end, he didn’t want to. It was relief and it was penance, in some twisted, abominable way that Obi-Wan didn’t deserve, that _Anakin Skywalker_ didn’t deserve – but they were both here, and they needed absolution either in pain, in retribution, in death.

They were destined to be like this, Obi-Wan had decided. The universe had condemned them strangers and then brothers and then they fell, bound together by their own fault lines and inability to unlove – to _let go,_ no matter how ruined and broken they tore themselves apart in the process. They couldn’t have denied it if they wanted to, but _oh_ how Obi-Wan had tried. He had tried to mask what was until his brother had become what wasn’t – the shattered facade of a mask that hid rivers of magma burning through Anakin’s soul like the waterfall of molten lava, the broken mirror of the fallen hero who became a monster that Obi-Wan blinding himself towards because he loved it so.

And Obi-Wan would pay the price for such attachment. Insanity. Like a rotting corpse destined to be consumed by tongues of fire at the base of the lava’s ravine, Obi-Wan’s own flesh would char in mutilating smithers as bone blackened with acidic sulfur – they were connected that way.

There were things in the universe that would burn and burn for eternity. Aflamed fires would devour the edge of the universe until the end of infinity, until the galaxy was nothing but smithereens and ash, and every pitiful damned soul would asphyxiate of the world’s stardust.

– And yet, in order to prove to Obi-Wan just how inevitably, fatally wrong he was, just because the universe erupted into eternal flames did not mean that things simply _broke._

In the ruined gallows of the universe lay their most damning, unseeable mistakes of the past, constantly existing to remind the world’s population of those who had come before and lit the spark themselves. It was the end of all things, though not by the fault of destiny, and instead by their own very human, very mortal hands stained and tainted in crimson lifeforce, forever scarred with the guilt of their own creation.

His hands would remain scarred, deformed, and beyond recognisable from the thousands of bleeding indentations cast upon his palm by his own design, and yet it would never be enough to suffice. 

Intangible, unseen shackles wrapped themselves around him and embedded themselves into his wrists, his ankles, his blood, his bones in retribution, in penance – whether avenging the galaxy or the Jedi or Anakin Skywalker, eluded him. They sunk deep into his bone marrow until they infected the flesh and rotted it through with parasitic, agonizing atonement for what had been brought upon them all, condemning Obi-Wan Kenobi to his fate.

The illusion of restraints mirrored that of string and twine, hung from marionette puppets that have been cut, came undone into discarded red ropes separating them from their destiny, but had left them paralysed, suffocated and dead all the same like broken pieces on the floor. The burning, vermilion ribbon of the illusion of fate tethered them to each other in catastrophically mortal ways as safety disguised as chains – in a rope that resembled a noose.

– And Obi-Wan finally realised with solidifying accountability, that it had always been there inside the Jedi, the universe, and Anakin Skywalker, hiding like a shadow in the dark for eons until it’s time had come to engulf their essence of pure light into nothingness. 

Instead of cutting the rope dead, like he should have, like he was _meant_ to, Obi-Wan’s inability to let go had passed down from master to apprentice like a carcinogenic disease, like a curse, and they ended up tied to each other as the noose – masquerading as a line of life – ruined them, and they became undone at the seams.

They danced around flames of magma and molten waterfalls, parading their bond of red ribbon around like a tethered lifeline instead of a suicidal weapon, and ruined each other with attachment the way the Jedi had always warned. 

When the floor dissipated from under their feet and the rope strangulated the air from their lungs until they hallucinated falling constellations of ephemeral stardust behind closed deadened eyelids losing unattainable oxygen, they fell together. 

“I loved you, but I couldn’t save you.” He told the rotting, dying ghost of Anakin Skywalker with tears burning themselves in his eyes as if they were made of the fire that had turned flesh into ash. His voice strangled around the words, throat seizing like a vice, like an invisible force had wrapped around it – because suddenly he was standing amongst the universe’s eternal damnation of streams of fire, though nothing had ever felt so cold. 

The only time he had told Anakin Skywalker he loved him was when he hadn’t any more. 

But, oh, gods he had. Forbiddenly. Infinitely. And still –

“It wasn’t _enough.”_

He had loved Anakin too much to let him go, to pierce his broken body of burned, rotting flesh and blackened bone fragments with a blade of cerulean, cyanic light; or to submerge the smithereens of what was left of the boy in the river of lava, entirely consumed in eulogic whispers of embers that resembled that of a pyre, the rightful deathbed of a man who should have been remembered as who he had been, not who he became.

And he had loved Anakin too much to turn a blind eye, to let his hurting, twisted broken facade of the boy he once knew reign destruction in the name of salvation to save his own family that Obi-Wan shouldn’t have understood, but he did. 

“No, it wasn’t.” Anakin said, not a hint of reprise in that voice that had suddenly melted of its inhuman, menacing drawl. It sounded like the innocent, childish scream of a child who dreamt of slavers and a mother; fire and a shadow in black. It sounded like a broken, wartorn man who dreamt of a dying wife, and the betrayal of a brother. 

The ghost’s charred and burned flesh began to mend itself, resorting blackened bone fragments into solid pieces like a mosaic of a thousand smithers building itself better, building itself whole. “When is a monster not a monster, Obi-Wan?” 

The metallic, artificial contraptions that mirrored stolen limbs contorted themselves black into flesh and bone, revealing unblemished, porcelain-like skin that was too perfect, too human for what it had been before. 

The twisted, bloodied yellow eyes faded into an ocean of calming, cerulean blue that had seen too much and done too much to be hiding behind the deceiving masquerade of youth. 

The ghost smiled. It was a sad, pitifully small thing, but he smiled nonetheless like who he had become, who Obi-Wan was, and who they were not didn’t matter, and perhaps it never did. 

“When you love it.” Obi-Wan breathed, letting the words wash over the freezing desert like some sort of retributive prayer that possessed the power to heal anything and everything at all. 

_When you used to sing it to sleep._

_When you used to run your fingers through its hair._

_When you are the reason it has become so mangled._

It wasn’t _enough._

”If you loved me, Obi-Wan, you would have killed me.”

_Maybe._

Either way –

It just so happened that ‘love’ was a falling action – a swan dive – and Obi-Wan guessed they fell in the same way dying stars did. It was hauntingly beautiful in a tragic sort of way to know that they died a little more every time they fell a little further from themselves, because neither of them had wings like they thought they had. 

The fragments of that night screamed whispers into Obi-Wan’s cascade of infinite dreams, and the nightmares seeped into the air like poison. Anakin had been dying – thrashing on the ablazed volcanic sands for his brother’s mercy as though he was someone who deserved rapture; until the denial of saviour in the manifestation of love that wasn’t love anymore sunk into his bone marrow, and the acidic, self-ruining hate was all he had. 

Obi-Wan left what was broken and shattered and dead – the pieces of Anakin Skywalker he couldn’t rebuild – to be abandoned on the sands of Mustafar with the ashes of who they’d both become. 

But no matter what he let Mustafar or the desert morph the boy into, or what his own mind conjured up – twisted, evil, broken, burned – Anakin Skywalker would always have the terrified eyes of a child whose master had failed him.

That was somehow worse than the shadow who haunted Obi-Wan like a ghost. 


End file.
